Tag Archives: Gimp

I’ve been having tremendous fun ever since I discovered twirling, many thanks to Bren of Brashley Photography and her Twirling Tuesday. In addition to just plain fun, it’s been a great help as I try to come to grips with the blend modes in the GIMP (they are the same in Photoshop). It is amazing how many different effects one can get from one photo.

Taking this photo of a peachy-orange deciduous azalea:

The two spun up layers are these:

Using different blend modes there are a stunning number of very different effects, here are some examples:

Then layering the original onto the different blended spirals using different blend modes you can get even more effects, including these rather trippy ones:

I find it fascinating, fun and rather relaxing to take a picture and see how many different looks I can get.

If you want to give it a try Bren’s post has directions for doing the twirling in Photoshop and my post Putting a twist on it using the GIMP has directions for using the GIMP (which is open-source=free).

I dropped a can of beans on my foot.

So I’ve mostly been confined to quarters. For me that means messing about with my computer and photographs. So this is not a story of great adventure in the wide world.

Here goes:

Once upon a time, a not-so-little, not-so-young girl..okay it was really an old-enough-to-be-a-grandmother, mature (most of the time) woman…got to go on a once-in-a-lifetime safari in Africa. She bought a new camera for the trip, with a huge (to her) zoom of 21x…

So long ago in experience, if not so many years. I have this block of photos from that trip that I treasure because they bring back great memories. My beloved (and still functioning!) Nikon L120 point and shoot caught some really great pictures, and I eventually got LightRoom to clean them up a bit and have used them now and again in posts.

I’m not much of a collage person, so this week’s challenge was a challenge. After humming and hawing I decided to try something totally new to me> making a digital collage of photographs. Here is a collage I made using Gimp from 5 of the pictures I took at Mount Rainier last week. I obviously have a lot to learn, and need to practice a lot but it was fun to try something new.